Blood, seaweed, the sounds of outer space—these are among the materials out of which Susan Kleinberg makes art. Scientific inquiry and methods inform many of her works, and questions about our relationship to each other, to society, and to the greater universe underpin her approach to everything she makes. She thinks about such relationships in terms of balance and harmony. In her words: “What do we all run from? What do we run to? Those questions [are] certainly always in a relationship with disequilibrium-equilibrium. It’s a kind of concern that runs through all of my work, in a...usually rather complicated narrative that’s not so absolutely distinct.”

Among
Kleinberg’s latest project is her evocative “Kairos” series (2013-14). In
keeping with her interest in collaborating with others, for this series she
worked closely with the scientists on the research and restoration team at the Musée du
Louvre. With
them, she peered through the museum’s powerful Hirox microscope at a sumptuous
and enigmatic Mesopotamian statue of the goddess
Ishtar, and captured photographs and videos of its surface. The resulting
images, in tones of blue, black, and yellow-green, look like views of the crust
of foreign planets or outer space vistas. It seems almost impossible to imagine
that such abstract, glowing images are, in fact, simply vastly magnified
details of the sculpture’s alabaster surface. Pushing such visual dissonance
further, the artist harnessed the sounds of the universe, recorded by NASA’s
Deep Space Antennae, to build a soundtrack for her video offering views ranging
across the sculpture’s form. Of this project she writes, “The unraveling images
are an excavation through borders, an essential comment on location of
perspective.” Here, as she suggests, two ostensibly different perspectives—the
micro and the macro—ultimately lead to a similar vision, place, or
point-of-view.